SpaceFlight Insider

Online/Digital

SpaceFlight Insider reports on events taking place within the aerospace industry. With our team of writers and photographers, we provide an “insider’s” view of all aspects of space exploration efforts. We go so far as to take their questions directly to those officials within NASA and other space-related organizations. At SpaceFlight Insider, the “insider” is not anyone on our team, but our readers.
Our team has decades of experience covering the space program and we are focused on providing you with the absolute latest on all things space. SpaceFlight Insider is comprised of individuals located in the United States, Europe, South America and Canada. Most of them are volunteers, hard-working space enthusiasts who freely give their time to share the thrill of space exploration with the world. Source

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Recent Articles

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Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner is expected to have its first test flight sometime later in 2018. To support that test, Aerojet Rocketdyne has completed the delivery of the crew module’s reentry thrusters. The thrusters were delivered to Boeing’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility (formerly Orbiter Processing Facility 3) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Boeing technicians will integrate the 12 MR-104J engines into the spacecraft, which is designed to be used up to 10 times.

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In a demo for a crowd of people from the Austin, Texas, South by Southwest festival, Firefly Aerospace fired its “Lightning 1” engine at 10 percent thrust for about a minute. The engine design will propel the second stage of the company’s “Firefly Alpha” rocket into space as early as 2019.

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NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting Ceres for three years, has observed changes on the dwarf planet’s surface indicating it is a dynamic, geologically active world. Two separate studies published in the journal Science Advances discuss these changes with one centering on the changing amounts of water ice and the other discussing the formation and distribution of carbonates. The probe’s Visible and Infrared Spectrometer (VIR) found water ice in 12 sites on Ceres’ surface.

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A Long March 2D rocket took to the skies March 17, 2018, sending China’s fourth Land Surveying Satellite into orbit. The booster roared skyward at 3:10 a.m. EDT (07:10 GMT) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China’s Gansu Province. Given that the task of the mission was to deliver the satellite into a low-Earth orbit (LEO), the flight most likely lasted for about 10 minutes.

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Following a public naming campaign that drew 115,000 participants, NASA’s New Horizons team has selected the name Ultima Thule for the spacecraft’s second target, Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) 2014 MU69, which the probe is scheduled to fly past on New Year’s Day 2019. Pronounced ultima thoolee, this name was nominated by more than 40 participants in the campaign, which ran from early November through December 6 of last year.

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The following is a statement from acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot on the Senate’s March 14 confirmation of Jeff DeWit to serve as agency’s Chief Financial Officer. “I personally met with Jeff during the confirmation process and I’m confident he will be a great fit with the agency’s CFO team.

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He was one of the leading minds in theoretical physics, all the while confined to a wheelchair and forced to communicate through a speech-generating device. While alive, the brilliant mind of Stephen Hawking could not be stopped. That amazing intellect fell silent on March 14, 2018, when he died at age 76. Hawking was born Jan. 8, 1942, to Frank and Isobel Hawking (née Walker) and would go on to gain an eclectic education, which saw early setbacks.

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Blue Origin has successfully tested its BE-4 engine at its longest duration yet revealed by the secretive spaceflight company. In a video tweeted out by the company’s founder, Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, it was announced that the engine, which is capable of 550,000 pounds (2,400 kilonewtons) of thrust, was tested at 65 percent of full-power for about 114 seconds. Development on the BE-4 began in 2011, but it did not become public until 2014.

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After a 31-year career at NASA, Robert Lightfoot is retiring effective April 30, 2018. For 14 months, he has been serving as the U.S. space agency’s acting administrator and promises to work with the Trump administration to ensure a smooth transition to the next administrator. Since Jan. 20, 2017, Lightfoot has been serving as the interim administrator for NASA, nearly doubling the record for the longest time the agency has been helmed by an acting administrator.

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